Last year, Governor Josh Stein created the North Carolina Artificial Intelligence (AI) Leadership Council to chart a roadmap on AI leadership and policy in the state. The roadmap report published by the council leaves many important areas unaddressed and falls significantly short on others, including harms like high bills, lost jobs, pollution, drought, mass surveillance, and more.
The council’s stated vision includes the following: “State leadership recognizes the potential for AI to disrupt communities and commits to protecting residents and workers from these potential impacts.” However, the council lacks voices from sectors most impacted by AI technology: education, nursing, and immigration and customs enforcement. Without this interdisciplinary input and concrete, adequate guardrails, AI technology can and likely will create net harm for communities, despite the roadmap’s assertion that “[n]o resident should be left behind or unprotected.”
More specifically, the recent roadmap report contains three significant gaps:
- Of the 25-member council, not a single member is a representative of an environmental justice community or represents the environmental sector at all. There is only one representative from the labor community, and that person voted against adoption of the roadmap. The remaining representatives appear to have a pro-AI slant as they are largely technology leaders at their respective universities or come from pro-AI industries. Because of this, there is a lack of balance in the resulting roadmap report, and a majority of the representatives on the council stand to gain substantially from an AI-heavy economic sector. This is putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
- The roadmap exposes glaring gaps in AI regulation in North Carolina, but it doesn’t recommend or suggest a concrete, enforceable path toward sound protections for all residents and communities. Indeed, many of the recommendations are just that: not official law and offer little in terms of strong enforcement. For example, the roadmap report mentions bills like H375 to protect against deepfakes and AI-generated sexual abuse content, but that bill didn’t pass when it was introduced in the state legislature.
- The roadmap downplays the harms from the infrastructure needed to make AI technology possible while “selling” a vision for North Carolina that is at odds with the public interest. Currently, there are no environmental regulations specific to data centers on the books in the state. Based on responses to House Bill 1189 and Senate Bill 730 during the 2026 short session, there doesn’t appear to be much legislator appetite for regulating dating centers, either, especially after the sales tax exemption on electricity for data centers was rescinded in the state budget. However, removing the sales and use tax exemption does little to offset the exemptions for other equipment used and to respond to increased energy bills from data centers, transparency in water withdrawals, or the build-out of methane gas infrastructure (and retention of coal plants) to power data centers, nor does it ensure fair tax revenues paid to communities. Many states are seeing millions of dollars of lost revenues from data centers alone. For communities, the externalities outweigh the meager gains from tax revenue.
To address these problems and challenges, we need a two-year moratorium on data centers in North Carolina. This would allow policymakers, advocates, and residents to temporarily pump the brakes on the rapid, often unregulated construction of data centers, as well as account for the harms from AI technology and the infrastructure used to power it.
A statewide data center moratorium is a rational response to the severe known impacts of the
facilities powering an inequitable technology, but there are many unknowns that need to be examined, as well: long-term health impacts, an AI industry “bubble” that could burst and lead to recession, and the possible stranded assets that could result (including data centers and fossil-fueled power plants).
These and other effects are not contained to a particular community. The “whack-a-mole” response of more than 24 local North Carolina jurisdictions (and growing) enacting moratoria indicates the need for state-level protections. Without them, some communities will unfairly bear the costs of data centers as projects push into their areas.
Pausing data center development will also provide time to iron out all the risks associated with AI technology and the governor’s AI council. Its next report should include better engagement with core leaders representative of communities most harmed by AI technology and infrastructure and propose concrete actions and regulations that are both feasible and protective.
